Emily Rogers’ fishy list of Project Café developers

Remember Emily Rogers? Sure you do. After all, she’s given us some of the most interesting stories about Project Café in the past couple of weeks. Now, though, she’s hung her credibility over a cliff with a document she just published. It is supposedly a list of third-parties with Wii 2 dev kits that Nintendo is passing around to get more developers excited about the system. It would normally be harmless to post up such a document and call it a “leak” at this stage in a new console’s development, but there are so many signs pointing to this one being fake that it becomes pretty much obvious that Emily fabricated it herself, which I’ll touch on in a moment.

Here you can see the original document Emily posted. It might not look weird at first, until you take a closer look at the top. Notice that it claims that E3 ends on June 8th, when it actually lasts until the 9th. Nintendo’s people would never make such a mistake, especially on a document like this. What’s more, the document displays Nintendo’s old red logo, which they stopped using in favour of a grey one several years ago. Lastly, what are Mario and Yoshi doing on a document that’s supposed to give third-party developers the hope that studios other than Nintendo’s own can experience commercial success on the system? At this point, you could still theoretically mark it as a rumour, albeit a highly, highly unlikely one. But now, that rumour gets crushed.

Here’s an edited version of the document, with the corrected date being the only difference. Okay, Emily changed the date to make the doc more presentable. But how did she do it so quickly, get the font right, and position the corrected date in exactly the right position? There is no way she could’ve done that unless she had the source file for the doc. And in turn, there is no way she could have the source file unless she made it herself, which would explain the red Nintendo logo as well as Mario and Yoshi, too.

What can we take away from this incident? Emily Rogers’s reports should be taken with a dump truck’s worth of salt from now on. She never claimed the above document was authentic, but she repeatedly states that she didn’t make it, despite all the evidence that she did. She said she’s going to put up screenshots of some Wii 2 games on May 10, and it’ll be less than a month from there until we find out just how much of her “information” was really true.